The conference fee is $795 and includes all courses, course
materials, five evenings of MacMania entertainment, and the
Bon Voyage Cocktail Party.

(Don't hesitate in filling out this form to help us tailor
this and future MacMania programs; simply select those courses
that might interest you — were you to come along on
our cruise.)

There will be two three-day
"MacMania tracks" going on at the same time ("New User"
and "Power User"); there will also be two three-day
"Photoshop Fling tracks" running as well ("Essentials & Effects"
and "Photography & Workflow"). Attendees may freely switch, at
any time, between them. Therefore, attendees may choose any
combination of full-day, half-day, or quarter-day seminars, from either MacMania and/or Photoshop Fling, for
a total of three (3) days' worth of sessions.

Oh, really? Sure, it's easy
to brag about how little you know about these
things, but so few people are willing to put their money
with their mouth is. Attend this session and silence all
the nay-sayers. How basic is this session? Turning the
Mac on and off is lesson two. Sure, by the end,
you'll no longer be a novice...but you'll be able to thrill
and amaze people with your tales of compressing a whole
month's worth of trial-and-error learning into one single
class.

There are American History
books that spend 500 pages covering the whole thing from
start to finish, and then there are the ones that cover
just one thing in obsessive detail. The latter leaves
you with ready answer to the question "So: the quill
that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence:
what species of bird did it come from?" But the former
approach leaves you with a broad understanding of absolutely
everything, and the relationship between all of the various
bits.

So the goal of this session
is to make sure you know just exactly what Mac OS X is
capable of, from user-level features that you'll use every
day to aspects of Unix system administration that will
make you glad that you're free to never ever ever touch
that sort of stuff if you don't want to, not even with
a ten-foot-pole strapped to a twelve-foot-pole.

The Mac and its accompanying
operating system are impressive accomplishments but even
Macs sometimes get the blues. Join Chris Breen as he shows
you how to keep your Mac and OS X on the straight and narrow
and, should it stray from that path, how to get it back
on its feet with the least amount of fuss. Along with preventive
and troubleshooting strategies, Chris will offer tips for
dealing with such common annoyances as spam, Mac/Windows
interaction, and printing problems.

If you are new to iLife,
come see what happens when you take five best of breed
multimedia applications — iTunes for managing music,
iPhoto for digital photography, iMovie HD for editing
digital video, GarageBand for creating your own music,
and iDVD for creating your own DVDs — and integrate
them so they work seamlessly. Suddenly it all connects!

Let your imagination soar:
The iLife 05 software applications let you do fun, creative
things with your pictures, music, and movies in ways that
PC users can only dream about — then you share your
joy with family and friends every which way from email
and the internet to print and DVD. An you can do all these
things and more, quite nicely, without thumbing through
a manual.

Learn why this suite of
tightly integrated applications continues to lead the
digital media revolution.

You have been using iLife
for a while but what can you really do with this program?
With iLife '05, you can easily create stunning softcover
books; import, organize, and edit RAW photos; and stun
them with fully customizable slideshows using iPhoto 5.
Edit high-definition 16:9 video from the newest camcorders
and create movies automatically with iMovie HD's new Magic
iMovie feature. Drag and drop video clips, pictures, and
music into the new animated drop zones found in iDVD 5
templates. Or create multi-track recordings in GarageBand
2. Of course, iTunes seamlessly integrates with iPhoto,
iMovie HD, iDVD and GarageBand and syncs with every member
of the iPod family. Come spend a day exploring the many
intermediate features of iLife 05.

What is a Power User? According
to Dr. Mac's Really Abridged Dictionary: Power User (pou'er
yoo'zer) n. 1. Someone who uses a Macintosh better, faster,
or more elegantly than you do. 2. Someone who can answer
Macintosh-related questions you can't.

Don't miss this unique opportunity
to spend some quality time with "one of the world's
leading (self-proclaimed) authorities on Mac OS X,"
and the author of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger For Dummies. The
session will feature a myriad of tips, hints, tutorials,
shortcuts, product demos, timesaving software recommendations,
where to find what you need on the Web, and much more.

Automator
Sunday the 5th, 1:30pm – 5pm
Speaker: Sal Soghoian

Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger"
introduces Automator, a new application that automates
anything on your computer quickly and easily. Using the
power of Mac OS X, Automator controls your applications
and files, automating — in an instant — what
you need done with them. Automator will change the way
you use your Macintosh. There's no scripting or coding,
it's drag-and-drop easy. It's truly "Automation for
the rest of us!"

Automator Product Manager,
Sal Soghoian, gives you a personalized tour of this innovative
application and you'll learn when and how to use Automator
to make automating complex or repetitive tasks a breeze!

Now that you can "automate"
your tasks, are you ready to look under the hood? In this
session, you will gain a thorough understanding of the fundamentals
used to create real-world AppleScript scripts. Step-by-step,
practical approaches and techniques are reviewed in detail
with plenty of snippets to aid you in developing a solid
foundation in script writing. Sal provides insight and examples
gleaned from over a decade of scripting the Mac OS and its
core applications. Special attention is paid to new AppleScript
tools and abilities found in Mac OS X Tiger.

There's a lot of power hidden
under the placid exterior of Apple's digital media suite,
iLife 05. Chris Breen goes beyond the basics and reveals
his favorite iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, GarageBand, and iTunes
tricks. Among them, you'll learn how to use iMovie to add
multiple playlists to your iPod shuffle, create an inescapable
kiosk presentation with iDVD, manipulate iPhoto's expert
sharing settings to make smaller (and better looking) slideshows,
make GarageBand play the blues, and alter audio files in
iTunes so they take up less space on your iPod.

We understand that with a
minimum of effort you can import video from your digital
camcorder into iMovie and string together enough scenes
to make a darned fine home movie, but is iMovie nothing
more than the means for making less-boring videos of your
kid's 10th birthday bash? Hardly. In Advanced Movie: Beyond
the Birthday Party, Chris Breen will show you how to bend
iMovie to your will to make dynamic video vignettes that
include blue screen effects, picture-in-picture tricks,
and sound effects that add realism (and a heapin' helpin'
of humor) to your work.

Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro: A Step Up
Friday the 10th, 8:30am – Noon
Speaker: Mark Swain

There is no doubt about it,
iMovie is a quick digital editing solution with loads of
features. However, if you have out grown iMovie's feature
set, this is a great session that will take you inside the
world of Final Cut. This guided tour starts off with getting
you comfortable with the Final Cut interface and work flow.
Learn the basics of non-linear editing, how to handle footage,
and the ins and outs of video footage. Explore advanced
editing tools such as ripple, roll, and slip edits. Also,
figure out which version of Final Cut is right for you when
we examine the differences between Express, and Professional
versions. This session will take you from raw footage to
finished video with little or no previous Final Cut experience.

If you want to make music
with GarageBand, this session is the perfect first step.
The premise is to record, mix, and master a complete rock
and roll song — using guitar, bass, drums, and vocals
— in 3.5 hours or less.

Along the way you'll discover
cost-effective hardware products that make using GarageBand
better; how Apple Loops can save you time and effort;
how to record vocals and acoustic instruments that sound
awesome; using GarageBand's software instruments effectively;
and lots of other cool stuff guaranteed to help you produce
better sounding music with GarageBand.

Learn the secrets of digital
photography on our Mexican cruise. In this full-day class
you’ll quickly discover how to become a better photographer
and tap the benefits of your digital camera. This Digital
Photography workshop will give you the power to capture
special moments and preserve precious memories—for
snap shots to put in an album or oversized prints suitable
for a gallery!

Learn how to:

• Tell beautiful,
visual stories by capturing great digital photos

• Use natural light
and flash the right way

• Use your camera’s
menus and functions to optimize what your camera can do

• Tap the value
of a digital camera’s features such as exposure
compensation, scene modes, and when to shoot RAW

Part 1: Light, Camera, Action Friday the 10th, 8:30am –
Noon

Light is the primary subject
of all of our photographs. In this illuminating, four-hour
session we’ll discuss the properties of light (and
how it relates to space, depth, and focus) and how to
use an understanding of light plus the various camera
controls and features to produce technically-proficient
photographs from the subtle to the dynamic.

• Understanding
the properties of light

• Effective use
of traditional camera controls

• Metering and
exposure

• F stop/depth
of field

• Shutter speed/motion
control

• ISO

• Understanding
digital camera menus

• Resolution

• File formats—RAW
and JPEG demystified

• White balance

• Tone control

• Sharpening

• Putting it all
together when shooting pictures

Part 2: Making Better Photographs Friday the 10th, 1:30pm –
5pm

How do you put a little bit
of soul into your pictures? Having control of your equipment
is necessary, but only the first step. In Part 2 of this
Workshop we will discuss how to move beyond technically
well-executed documentation photography to exciting images
that allow us to share, in an artful and memorable way,
the experience of the moment we chose to record.

Photoshop is a vast and
complex program. It does certain things very, very well,
and it does others very, very strangely. Using the program
effectively is a matter of knowing which tools work best
and when best to use them. Attend this introductory class
and learn how to use the right features in the right order
and save yourself a lot of heartache.

Newly enhanced in CS2,
corrective filters rank among the program’s oldest
and finest capabilities. Besides permitting you to sharpen
the contrast of an image, blur away the defects, and remove
digital noise and JPEG artifacts, they can help you hone
in on exactly those details that need help the most. Combined
with Photoshop’s Masking function, filters make
it possible to separate even the most complex foreground
subject from its background and composite that image into
a new setting. Sound amazing? You have no idea.

• Filtering basics

• The new filters
in Photoshop CS2

• Unsharp Mask
and High Pass

• Removing motion
blur with Smart Sharpen

• The wonders of
Remove Noise

• Gaussian Blur
and Median

• Creating an Edge
Mask

• Using the Color
Range command

• Extracting image
elements

• Blue screen and
sky

• Full-on Masking

The Bold and the New
in Photoshop CS2Thursday the 9th, 8:30am – Noon
Speaker: Deke McClelland

Photoshop CS2 is the most
ambitious, exciting, and downright seminal update to Adobe’s
flagship image editor in the past five years. Vanishing
Point, envelope-style image warping, floating-point exposure,
and the stand-alone Bridge all qualify as flat-out great.
Then there’s my favorite feature, smart objects,
which let you do three things you could never do before:
First, you can apply non-destructive transformations.
Second, you can replicate a layer and edit all copies
simultaneously. And third, you can adjust the composition
of imported camera raw and Illustrator layers long after
importing them. If flexibility and power appeal to you,
join Deke and learn how to make them yours.

Creating realistic textures,
the effects of lights and shadows, and the ability to
make an image jump off the page will be covered in this
session. Filters? There are many of them in Photoshop.
What happens when you use them for other than their intended
purpose? What happens when you put a few of them together?
You will create images that are more realistic than a
camera could ever achieve.

The ability to bend things
on a curve has been one of the most asked-for features,
yet it has always been there. Bert will demonstrate the
use of the Displace Filter to make controlled, fluid distortions.
The Liquify Filter will also be explored for distortion
effects. Distorting with the Transform function will be
explored for perspective matching and the creation of
realistic reflections.

Learn everything you ever
wanted to know but were afraid to ask about color management.
We’ll start with a look at the basic science that
underpins color management — don’t worry,
the session is guaranteed equation-free — because
doing so helps you understand not only how color management
works, but also why it sometimes fails to do so.

Next, we’ll look at
profiles, and their relationship to the devices they represent,
with a view to developing sound troubleshooting skills.

Last but not least, we’ll
delve deep into Photoshop’s color management features,
mine the mysteries of working spaces, and look at what
it takes to build and maintain a complete capture-to-output
workflow.

With the advent of Camera
Raw 3.0, I look at Photoshop as a plug-in for Camera Raw,
rather than the other way around. In this session, you’ll
learn the many benefits of shooting raw. Then you’ll
learn to exploit the vast amount of information raw files
contain by making use of Adobe Camera Raw’s powerful
features, so that when your images land in Photoshop,
you’ll have very little to do to them except press
Save and choose a file format.

Possibly the greatest challenge
that digital shooters face is the sheer amount of data
they generate. You’ll learn that the key to avoiding
drowning in data is to master metadata and make it your
friend. You’ll learn how to build a complete digital
raw workflow using Bridge, Camera Raw, and Photoshop using
automation wherever possible so that you still have time
to shoot, and to have a life.

The experienced user knows there are a million tools in
Photoshop to adjust your images for maximum impact, but
which ones work best, work fastest, and are most “photographer
friendly”? In this session you will learn all sorts
of workflow-enhancing techniques including: 101 uses for
Auto Levels, how to create nondestructive dodge and burn
layers, advanced gray-scale conversions, eyedropper color
correcting, stained teeth whitening, red-eye neutralizing,
blotchy skin unifying, and the only way to use Photoshop’s
healing brush — all with an emphasis on quality,
flexibility, and speed.

• Which editing
tools are best to use when fixing images — and which
ones to avoid

Photoshop has so many image
editing options that it’s often hard to know where
to start, and once you’ve mastered a few tools,
you tend to use them for everything (when all you have
is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail).

We’ll start with basic adjustments like Levels,
Curves, Hue/Saturation, and Shadow/Highlight, possibly
turning up some hidden goodies you may have overlooked.
Then we’ll progress to how these basic adjustments
can be modulated and controlled using layers, layer masks,
and blending modes.

We’ll look at strategy as well as tactics. Do I
build a monster layered file that lets me keep all my
options open, or do I use History instead? Last but not
least, we’ll delve into detail control-dustbusting,
blemish removal, and sharpening.